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Put simply, we as people tend to give failure more credit than it deserves because we know more examples of where it has been pivotal to a success story rather than detrimental – a.k.a. the failure myth.

But, how about those who haven't made it? Should they thrive on and adhere to the “keep on failing until you succeed mantra”? Not necessarily.

James Atlas once wrote, "Maybe we do not all have the luxury of failing". I agree.

Maybe some of us have families to feed and need to be smarter about risk-taking in order to make ends meet.

Maybe failing in your twenties, when you have your whole life ahead of you, is completely different than failing in your forties, when the years ahead are shorter.

Or maybe, just maybe, failure is the difference between fulfillment and life dissatisfaction. Just ask Van Gogh, who only sold one painting in his entire lifetime and was plagued by depression most of his life.

Let us not take failure lightly. Instead, let us succeed as fast as we can – if we’re ever truly going to make it.

Failure is an over-glorified pain to be avoided. (Especially if behavioral economics tells us people respond nearly twice as strongly to losses as they do to gains!) Sure, we can and should learn a lot from it. Failure, if taken rightly, can be used as a positive force in our lives -- but we should also try to minimize its impact and learn how to avoid it in the first place, instead of just correcting our failures and learning from them once they have already happened.

As a result, here are three key pointers that have helped me brace for -- and ultimately avoid failure. Perhaps they can be of use to you too.

Test the waters before taking the plunge.

Do you really have what it takes? Have independent third parties corroborated your confidence for success? Make sure you can crawl before trying to walk.

Fail quietly, privately, and in isolation.

What better way to fail and learn than in an environment where it doesn't really matter?

Finally, be sure to build antifragility in your life

My favorite essayist and hedge fund manager, Nassim Taleb, is a proponent of an idea I think we should all adopt in order to combat the impact of failure: antifragility.

In his upcoming book, Taleb explains the notion of antifragility as not just being resilient, but also having the ability to take hits, absorb shocks, and benefit from the experience itself.

Taleb gives many examples on how to incorporate antifragility in his book, but I think one of the best ways to do so is to have enough cash reserves that can allow you to take aggressive but high reward risks. This can be done by saving up a cash pile that could enable you to take a year off work to try out various ventures, etc.

After all, taking failure seriously and building cushions of support that can absorb the harshest of downfalls is the surest way to success. There is no need to romanticize mistakes, learning from them only after the fact. Instead, we should learn how to best avoid failure and in the worst-case scenarios, be prepared to bounce back from it.